Over the past few decades, considerable attention has been given to structural control systems to mitigate structural vibration under natural hazards such as earthquakes and extreme weather conditions. Traditional wired structural control systems often employ a large amount of cables for communication among sensors, controllers and actuators. In such systems, implementation of wired sensors is usually quite complicated and expensive, especially on large scale structures such as bridges and buildings. To reduce the laborious installation and maintenance cost, wireless control systems (WCSs) are considered as a novel approach for structural vibration control. In this work, a WCS is developed based on the open source Arduino platform. Low cost, low power wireless sensing and communication components are built on the Arduino platform. Structural control algorithms are embedded within the wireless sensor board for feedback control. The developed WCS is first validated through a series of tests. Next, numerical simulations are performed simulating wireless control of a 3-story shear structure equipped with a semi-active control device (MR damper). Finally, experimental studies are carried out implementing the WCS on the 3-story shear structure in the Intelligent Infrastructure Systems Lab (IISL). A hydraulic shake table is used to generate seismic ground motions. The control performance is evaluated with the impact of modeling uncertainties, measurement noises as well as time delay and data loss induced by the wireless network. The developed WCS is shown to be effective in controlling structural vibrations under several historical earthquake ground motions.

Date Published: 27 March 2015
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 9435, Sensors and Smart Structures Technologies for Civil, Mechanical, and Aerospace Systems 2015, 94351D (27 March 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2083707

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9435:
Sensors and Smart Structures Technologies for Civil, Mechanical, and Aerospace Systems 2015
Jerome P. Lynch, Editor(s)